"Why did you have to be something that nobody
ever heard of? Why didn't you become a doctor or a lawyer?"
:O)
I think that when we are able to laugh at some of this stuff, it is a true sign that we are healing, that our perspective has shifted. It's gone from how big they are to...something else, but I don't know what yet.
I am still flabbergasted that the cruelty I've experienced, those things so personally devastating to me, to my personhood and self image...that stuff is just what people so afflicted do. There was nothing personal about any of it.
WTF
That is why my sister is such a great salesperson, I suppose. She will sell anything to anyone, get and take money from anyone (even people on airplanes), and feels totally justified in doing so. She takes an enormous profit on the things she sells.
I cannot even do a garage sale appropriately.
When I think of the enormous amount of pain on pain that might have been avoided if I had known this sooner, I can hardly believe it. Just think, if I had known not to believe my mother when she made her comment that I must not have been such a good mother after all.
Oh, you have no idea.
It's the strangest thing. I am seeing all this differently. Maybe you were right, MWM, and we should be learning all we can about these diagnoses. It seemed somehow unfair to me. As though I were secretly calling someone names, or labeling people instead of taking responsibility for the wrongness and trying to address it. Yet, the things you all are reporting are so shockingly similar to the things I hear: My mom is 84. The last time I saw her, she was still wearing skin tight jeans or shorts. She says the legs are the last thing to go. She is an attractive woman, but 84 is 84. Here is another interesting thing: So, I was going to pump gas for my mother. And she had me so convinced of my ineptitude regarding every other aspect of self that by the time I actually pumped the gas, I could not get the pump to work properly.
My mother had to do it!
I was in my late fifties when that happened.
It just blows me away that I may have been harboring a sociopath in that place in my heart where my mother should be.
Which are the diagnoses that would apply then, to someone raised as I was?
1) Locus of control it out there, not in here.
2) I always make everything better than it is. Except that things are actually very fine. I am grateful for knowing this. It truly is like a kaleidescopic pattern falling suddenly, perfectly, into place, when I compare those stories I know about my family of origin with those I hear here with all of you. All the cruelty, all the strange, horrible things that happened...all at once, none of that is my fault
and neither is the fact that I could not prevent the damage, physical or psychologic, to my sibs.
How sad for all of us...but how fortunate we are to have one another to work through it with.
In the interests of exposing and healing a secret hurt ~ which is what happened for me when I read about MWM dad being so handsome (THAT HAPPENED TO ME, TOO), these are other strangenesses:
My sister's kids invariably took center stage by dancing/singing/performing with my sister as conductor. She is the same way with her grandchild. Buying influence or something with the child's ability to march around and sing a song. Everyone stops whatever conversations were happening to listen, of course.
That is a sociopathic thing to do. Once would be fine, but this is what my sister's children and now, her grandchildren, are doing.
Huh.
More, later.
Cedar